Visa’s Q2 2026 net revenue rose 17% year-on-year to $11.2bn, with value-added services and stablecoin settlement volume both accelerating sharply
Visa reported its strongest net revenue growth in four years, with fiscal second-quarter revenue rising 17% year on year, driven by broad-based acceleration across consumer payments, commercial activity and stablecoin settlement.
Net revenue reached $11.2bn for the three months ending March 2026, with adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of $3.31 coming in ahead of the $3.10 consensus estimate. Payment volume also grew 9% in constant dollars to $3.7tn, with processed transactions matching that pace at 66 billion.
In the US, credit volume rose 10% and debit 7%, with e-commerce outpacing face-to-face spending throughout the quarter.
Visa’s Chief Financial Officer Christopher Suh said consumer spending showed no signs of weakness across spend bands, while CEO Ryan McInerney described the result as the strongest net revenue growth since 2022 – and, stripping out the post-pandemic recovery and the Visa Europe acquisition, the strongest since 2013.
Value-added services and stablecoins drive momentum
Much of the quarter’s outperformance was driven by value-added services, which grew 27% to $3.3bn and now represent 30% of Visa’s total net revenue. Its own large transaction model – built on billions of transactions – delivered up to a fivefold increase in fraud value capture in early results.
Suh said demand was particularly strong for network products among issuers and acquirers, as well as marketing services built around Visa’s Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games sponsorship. With the FIFA World Cup less than 45 days away at the time of the call, he flagged further upside ahead as client activation campaigns continue to build.
Stablecoin settlement with another core growth driver of growth for Visa. It now runs over 160 stablecoin card programmes globally, with payment volume through those products up nearly 200% year-on-year in the quarter.
The company has expanded its settlement infrastructure to nine blockchains – adding Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon and Tempo during the period – and is running a $7bn annual run rate in stablecoin settlement volume, up more than 50% since the prior quarter.
McInerney said stablecoin-linked card products carry “very similar economics to the products that we have today.”
Agentic commerce and the CLI opportunity
Beyond the immediate results, McInerney used the investor call to set out Visa’s longer-term positioning in AI-driven commerce. Framing the company as a “hyperscaler of payments,” he argued that network scale, security infrastructure and consumer trust give Visa structural advantages as agentic transactions become more prevalent.
He pointed to four growth drivers:
- higher transaction volumes from purchase-splitting and micro-transactions;
- reduced friction in B2B payments through automated invoice handling;
- GDP growth flowing from AI adoption more generally;
- and broader digitalisation of commerce.
Two of Visa’s recent product launches back up this direction of travel. Intelligent Commerce Connect offers a token vault-agnostic on-ramp for agent builders and merchants, while Visa CLI – currently a proof-of-concept – demonstrates card payments via command-line interfaces.
McInerney said early developer feedback had been positive and that Visa plans to scale CLI commerce through new standards, products and pricing frameworks.
Guidance raised amid Middle East uncertainty
Visa raised its full-year adjusted guidance to net revenue growth in the low double-digit to low teens range, up from a prior outlook of low double digits, with adjusted EPS growth revised to the low teens.
Its Q3 2026 is expected to be the softest of the year, with net revenue growth forecast in the low double digits and EPS growth in the mid-to-high single digits before a recovery in Q4. Suh attributed the Q3 step-down to higher incentive costs and a tough comparator for currency volatility.
The principal near-term uncertainty is the conflict in the Middle East, which weighed on cross-border travel spend in the CEMEA region – around 6% of Visa’s total payments volume – particularly in March.
Cross-border volume excluding intra-Europe transactions rose 11% in Q2, consistent with the prior quarter, and early Q3 data through 21 April showed the figure at 9%. Suh noted that normalising for Ramadan timing brought April growth back in line with February levels.
Visa repurchased $7.9bn of stock during the quarter – its highest quarterly buyback on record – and the board approved a new $20bn share repurchase programme, bringing total buyback capacity to approximately $33bn.
